


Bare-boned and crazy

by Tabata



Series: Leoverse [277]
Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Criminals, Bank Robbery, Crimes & Criminals, M/M, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:27:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23380177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata
Summary: Leo was condemned to two months that became three after he assaulted a guard twice. He spent most of this time in solitary without his medications. In the day of his release, Blaine comes to pick him up, expecting the worst.
Relationships: Blaine Anderson/Original Male Character(s)
Series: Leoverse [277]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/30541





	Bare-boned and crazy

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNING:** This story is an **AU** from the original 'verse. What happens in here has little to none correlation with what happens in Leonard Karofsky-Hummel VS The world or Broken Heart Syndrome. The characters involved are (mostly) the same, but situations and relationships between them may be completely different.  
> In this particular verse Blaine and the boys (and girl) are a criminal team, very much like the one you can find in certain kind of movies or tv series (anyon said Leverage?), that's specialized in thefts. At some point, Federal Agent Sam Vanderbilt (yes, she finally has a surname) makes a deal with them: all their records will be erased if they start working with the government.  
> Here we are waaaaay before that.
> 
> written for: COW-T#10 (M2)  
> prompt: Warning: Alternate Universe – Crime/Gangsters

Blaine shows up at the prison more than an hour before the appointed time, even if he knows perfectly well that they will not release Leo ahead of time. He just wants to make sure he'll be there the moment those doors will open.

Leo's stay in the State medium security prison was not planned – Blaine never plans to send any of his boys to jail, let alone those that could survive it the worst – but it was inevitable when the choice came down to either him or Cody. Leo himself offered himself to go in Cody's place, despite he knew his mental condition was not going to make it easy.

He was condemned to two months that became three after he assaulted a guard twice. The ward thought it better to put him in solitary, and Blaine couldn't agree more with that choice, but it has been an agony to wait for the day of Leo's release without any chance to visit him and see how he was doing.

Blaine has tried several times through their lawyer to get some form of visitation – even ten minutes would have been enough, really, just to look at Leo and assess how he was doing – but the ward thought _there weren't the premises_ and, even if the prison gave him constant updates on Leo's mental and health situation, Blaine never trusted them completely as he had already seen, upon Leo's admission to the prison, that they didn't deem his case as serious as it was instead. And the fact that they didn't let him have his medication on a regular basis is proof enough of that.

Blaine parks the car in the parking lot – they have one specifically for any errands outside of their cons and they change it every three months to make sure nobody can keep track of it – and he gets ready to wait for Leo to come out as he's not allowed to wait inside. Inmates don't comes out from the entrance, which is where the waiting rooms are.

He writes to Annie and the boys who keep texting him for news. They all wanted to come, but Blaine thought it wasn't a great idea as Leo tends to get overwhelmed easily when he's not okay, and it is most likely that he won't be. So they stayed home, but they're all worried, and it makes Blaine a little proud that they are. 

They didn't know each other before Blaine found them and invited them to join the family. And they weren't babies anymore when Blaine came across them – the youngest being Leo who was fourteen at the time – so it could have been hard for them to get used to each other, but they did. They grew up together and learned to love each other on top of working as a team. Then puberty hitting a few of them made everything a little more _complicated_ , but it still moves Blaine every time they show how much they care for each other.

The gate opens at five past four, more than twenty minutes after it was supposed to.

Blaine is already dialing the lawyer's number when he finally gets a glimpse of Leo's pale face as he makes his way towards the last gate, flanked by two female prison guards. It's not more than a hundred feet, but it seems to last longer with the cold sound of the alarms setting off every time a gate closes behind him and the one in front of him opens.

Leo's wearing the same clothes he had when he was admitted, a black t-shirt with “My brain works 6x faster than yours” written in white letters and a pair of old jeans with a few weird patches along the left leg that Leo himself has sewn on them in one of his creativity rushes. He looks wary and tired, and he reminds Blaine the day he met him for the first time.

Blaine was in the clinic to lure some very private health-related information on a possible target out of a pretty nurse who was working there and had been showed to be partial to him during recon. Leo was there with his wreckage of a father because the man had broken his arm and he needed an x-ray. 

Blaine had noticed Leo because the kid couldn't sit still. In the fifteen minutes he had been there talking the nurse stupid, Leo had stood up and walked around the waiting room several times, he had sat down again for a grand total of twenty seconds and then he had gone to the nearest vending machine and pushed all the buttons nervously.

Blaine wouldn't have given him much attention – Leo was a teenager, after all, and they are restless by nature – if Leo hadn't looked so tired and stressed out, his nerves worn so thin that he would literally jump at any unexpected noise.

Later on that day, Leo had found Blaine in the nurses room as he tried to hack into the hospital system and find part of the information he couldn't get from the beautiful nurse, who he had even snogged for good measure. It had taken Leo two seconds and a very quick – action movie style quick – typing to get Blaine into the hospital system. No questions asked.

And Blaine had seen the change in his eyes and in his posture while he was typing away at the computer, retrieving illegal information for him. Leo had _calmed down_. The tiredness had stayed, but he had seemed suddenly less restless. 

That change had stayed with Blaine for days after that and he couldn't shake off the idea that the kid was not alright at all. So he had made some researches and found out what was going on in his life. From there to take Leo with him was a short step.

Blaine gets off the car, bringing one of Leo's hoodie with him. He get closer to the net and tries to catch his eye, but Leo is looking down, his fingers clutching at the brown bag they must have put all his belongings in. The moment the last gate opens, Blaine is wrapping his arms around him, kissing him on his head over and over and over. “You're okay now,” he whispers. “You're here with me.”

Leo seems unresponsive, and for a terrifying moment Blaine is afraid that these past three months have done some irreversible damage, but then Leo drops the bag and clings to Blaine's shirt with both his hands, hiding his face into his chest. He doesn't cry but he's holding him so tight that his knuckles are white.

“It's alright,” Blaine strokes his back, soothingly. “Do you want to go home?”

Leo nods.

*

For the first seven days Leo doesn't speak a word.

He only expresses himself through nods and shakes of his head, or he doesn't react at all. The others are confused and worried because without Leo's constant chatting and nervous moving in and out of the rooms of their house, or the occasional sound of his office chair rolling around, the house falls into an eerie silence.

Blaine has recovered a fresh batch of Leo's medication from his usual dealer – since the legal channels are not an option for him, they had to get creative and find another way – but they don't instantly start working, and there's a long period of adjustment when Leo either feels worse or he sleeps all the time, which at some point they start to think it's the better option since Leo has fallen into a behavioral pattern that doesn't look good at all.

He doesn't want to be alone, but when they are all together around the TV or chatting with each other, all the different sounds and noises get overwhelming for him and he starts getting restless because he can't process any of that the way he usually would. Music helps, but any mean of isolation that would normally help him focus – like earphones – now gives him anxiety because he's been isolated for too long. Any wrong attempt to comfort him results in a fit of frustrate rage.

They all get to the point where they have no idea how to deal with him. He himself realizes that and he ends up limiting his interactions to Blaine, who seems the only one to know how to handle him, but that not only makes him sad, it is also counterproductive. 

Then, halfway through the third week of this exhausting situation, things seem to look up. The first proper sentence Leo speaks, he speaks to Cody. He shows up in his room one morning and asks if they can watch a movie together. They try – of course – and Leo can't sit through the whole movie, but it's a first step. It's actually better than seeing him staring at the ceiling all day. It feels normal because he rarely could sit still through a whole movie before.

The fact that he starts moving around aimlessly is a good sign to them.

It's tiresome to witness as he reads two pages of a book and then he goes grab his music player to listen to the same song three times and then go back to his book to read two more pages before marching into the kitchen and deciding he needs to make a cake now. It's tiresome but at least it _feels_ normal.

Except that it is not.

Before jail, Leo was not exactly okay but he had gotten to a point where he could balance his worse moments with some very good ones. He had techniques to cope with the worst of it all and they were working, even If sometimes they were a little annoying for the others – mostly for Adam, since Leo's favorite mean of distraction was Cody.

Now he's going from total apathy to complete frenzy – doing nothing for days and then doing everything at once – and Blaine just knows it can't go on like this for long without exploding into something worse. That is all the much clearer when Leo knocks at this office's door with a request.

“I have an idea,” he begins, after storming in and coming to stand right next to Blaine's desk. Personal space forgotten.

Blaine sighs and takes off his glasses, which he only wears in the inner sanctum of his own bedroom. “Let's hear it,” he invites him.

Leo grabs the first thing he finds on Blaine's desk, which happens to be a pen, and he starts rolling it obsessively through his fingers. “I wanna get involved in the next heist,” he says, all in one breath. “I know you're preparing something and I want in.”

“It's not really an heist,” Blaine says. “It's more of intricate money withdrawal. We need a little liquidity.”

Between the previous failed heist, the trial and the medications, they need some emergency money. He's not planning on taking too much, just a little to go by until the next big heist that should refill the various accounts.

“Good, so it's an easy one,” Leo insists. “Let me do something.”

“It's a very simple thing, kiddo, I'm not even sending Annie to do some recon,” Blaine goes on. “I haven't decided the details yet, but it'll probably be just Adam and Cody. They go in, open the vault, they go out. It's a small bank, basic security systems. It'd bore you to death.”

“It's perfect!” Leo says with painfully too much enthusiasm. “I can give them support, glitching some camera footage, unblocking doors, that kind of stuff. Blaine, I need to do something.”

“Have you tried to work on those programs you were working on before everything happened?” Blaine asks, tentatively. “Compiling, or whatever you call it, used to help yo—“

“It's not working!” Leo raises his voice. “I need to do something _useful_. You can't keep me trapped in here forever! I have been trapped enough, don't you think?”

Blaine looks at him sternly as he does every time Leo loses control over something and they both know he could have avoided it. He keeps staring at him until Leo calms down again. “Can we discuss this reasonably or not?”

Leo pouts for a moment and then sighs. “Yes. I'm sorry,” he sighs. “It's just that I think it would help me. I need something useful to focus on. Something that I know will be helpful to someone else. Let me do this, Blaine please. I want to go back to work.”

Blaine is not really sure this is a solution – actually, he's pretty sure it is not – but if they have to give it a try before discarding it, such a simple job is the perfect occasion.

*

The job really is easy.

They go in, Cody opens the vault with his magic fingers, they fill a few bags with money and they go out. Estimated execution time: 25 minutes.

Leo's duty is to turn off the alarms and guide them through the process of inserting a few codes before they can get to the actual vault which is, surprisingly enough, still mechanic. It's a no-brainer, they've done this a million times before, none of them is worried, and Cody and Adam are actually happy to have Leo chirping in their ears again.

“Okay, that was easy,” Adam says as he pushes the first gate open and he lets Cody in. “Now, that's the fun part for you, nerd.”

It's a simple 3x3 keypad, Leo could get the right number combination from it in his sleep. They have seen him unlock way more complicated systems – some of them even needing them to plant one or more devices in different places even weeks before – and yet the light on this one doesn't turn immediately green.

“What's going on?” Adam asks after two minutes of furious typing and some random, pointless beeping.

“Give me a minute, I—“ Leo's voice tremble a bit. “I'm almost done.”

Two more minutes pass and nothing happens. “We're four minutes behind schedule, Leo. Can you open it or not?”

“Repeating it won't make me work faster, Walker!”

“It'd be nice if you could at least work,” Adam retorts, irritated. “God, I miss when he was quiet, already.”

Cody places an hand on Adam's arm. “Leo, is there something wrong?”

“No, I—“

Then he goes horribly quiet for a very long time. Adam is about to speak again, but Cody stops him. “Leo, take a deep breath, we've still got time.”

“I can't,” Leo pushes his chair back. “It doesn't fucking work.”

“Leo, it will work,” Cody insists, while Adam in the background curses under his breath. “Just guide me through it. I can do it manually, maybe.”

“No, you can't. I'm supposed to—“

“Stay with me.”

But they hear the thud of Leo's headpiece being thrown on the desk. They have seen that happen so many times in the past that they can clearly see him doing it. “Leo, no!” Cody whimpers.

“What the fuck are we supposed to do now?” Adam freaks out. “He said he was going to take care of the stupid system, so we didn't bring anything along.”

“Get away from there,” Blaine voice comes low and tired from the earpiece.

“What?”

“Adam, don't argue with me. Take everything and get out,” Blaine repeats. “We'll try again in a few days. We need to regroup.”

“No, what we need is to find a doctor for him because he was a problem before and now he's a liability!” Adam growls.

“That's enough! You either do as I say or you're on your own.”

Adam curses again but he grabs the bag and he starts marching out. Cody looks at him and then he sighs. “Is he okay?” He asks as he puts back his picking tools in his backpack.

“No.” That's all Blaine says, not a hint of hope, not a _we'll get through this_. “Just come back, please.”

As he gets on the car again, Cody thinks they went through worse things than this, each one of them personally and all of them together.

And he will stay positive for them all, if he has to.

It's not going to be easy, though, when he's got no idea of what he'll find once he gets home.


End file.
